A Kalzium double bill today, with Kalzium gaining recognition in OsnaBrück University's annual prize giving, and this week's People Behind KDE interview. Find out everything you wanted to know about chemistry, the small print on toothpaste, and why not to visit Bavaria in the People Behind KDE interview with Carsten Niehaus, author of Kalzium. Read on for details of the prize.

KDE this week gained further recognition from the wider world. In an awards
ceremony at Osnabrück University in Germany, Carsten Niehaus won the
Intevation Prize for Achievements in Free Software for his work on Kalzium, KDE's interactive periodic table. The judges from Intevation praised the interactive features of Kalzium which help students by making facts easily discoverable. The prize was open to all past and present
members of the University.

Accepting a cheque for €750, Carsten said "It is an honour to be rewarded for my project Kalzium. I created it to have a good tool for my own use, but with a great community behind me I was able to develop something for others that I am proud of. A prize like this helps to keep up the motivation to improve Kalzium to be the tool of choice for teacher and student alike!" Kalzium, which takes its name from the German for the element calcium, supports many advanced features, including plotting data from all elements to show trends in the mass or atomic size for example. Its ease of use and range of features have won users in Osnabrück as well as further afield: Egon
Willighagen, lead developer of BlueObelisk and CDK, says, "Kalzium brings the
core chemistry in an easy-to-browse way to the desktop".

Kalzium is part of the KDE Edutainment project, which provides educational
software for all ages. "I am really pleased to see a KDE-Edu program getting another award. Kalzium's success is due to Carsten's constant efforts to improve his software and I am very proud to see him getting this award", Anne-Marie Mahfouf, a member of the KDE Edutainment team, said.

All the big schoolbook vendors only produce software for Windows, sometimes for Mac. So each and every single school-book software is missing (there are many such programs, perhaps about 3 per schoolbook)

The situation with 3d-viewers for proteins and other big molecules is now much butter than two years ago, but still those for windows are oftern better.

D-GISS. D-GISS is a software almost every (at least german) school has but which doesn't work in linux as it is somehow based on MS-Access. It is not used for teaching but more a database. Still, I would really like to be able to run D-GISS. It doesn't even install in wine.

There are many more, especially the situation with school-book software is a shame. And the vendors don't even answer email when you contact them about it.

Btw: About the drawing tools: Egon Willighagen pointed me to "his" java based drawing tool. It doesn't crash and is the best I know for Linux, but still ACDLabs is much better. Sorry that I have to say that :(

It looks nice and may in certain situations be usefull as a teaching tool, but in many ways ktechlab are a toy. Besides electronics are one of the areas where Linux support is good, several of the major vendors have Linux versions of their tools.

In other areas the situation are not that good, increased addoption of Java has improved the situation some. And you can even find helpfull tools in the form of Java applets scattered around the net. Usually very specialized, but usefull to help explain/understand different concepts. Like this collection: http://www.falstad.com/mathphysics.html

Amarok is only parsing the html the wikipedia spits out, removes the wikipedia-stuff and displays the content. What if the Wikipedia changes the html? Amarok would need to be patched. Also, the integration is much more than just displaying an article.

Why is that not really useful? I thought the pre-processed data is what was wanted to begin with? (That this needs to be processed first to embed images and links etc. is obvious, but this also offers added flexibility.)

to Carsten and all other ppl that contributed to Kalzium and the other kde-edu developers! you guys are doing a great job, its very cool to show off your apps and i'm sure they are being used, and will be used even more :D

If somebody want to donate money: I have a bank-account and an amazon-wishlist (german amazon). It would be really nice to recieve a DVD or two of course :-) But Kalzium will always be free as in beer and as in freedom.

Just a big "Thank you!" to Carsten and all the kdeedu developers for the amazing applications they are creating. My wife and I educate our children at home, and the KDE programs are proving extremely useful. Please keep up the good work!

What does he mean there is no Linux program for scientific drawing of compounds? That's just silly, so what has all the chemical physicists used all those years when the rest of the scientific world has been writing in TeX/LaTeX? Probably something like XyMTeX, that's what.

Jonas, of course you can draw them. I studied chemistry myself without touching non-free software. I used xfig, inkscape, latex, xdrawchem and so on. But those tools are absolutly not usable for a regular chemistry teacher. If you want Linux in School you need software for teachers and students alike.
Furthermore, ACDLabs is *much* better than any !windows solution out there. It is easy to use, fast, high quality, supports all kinds of calculations, has a very good 3d-mode, names molecules for you and so on. *That* is what we need, not a ChemTex-solution where you need to read 10 howtos to draw Acetylesalicyleacid!